Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Is Fedora better than Ubuntu?

Isn't it beautiful? Well this is a screen shot of Fedora. In the last few posts you read about Ubuntu so here are some reviews of Fedora. Decide about the title question on your own, although most agree that Ubuntu is the best. However your needs may be different, also the Live USB option is cool to have.

Fedora 9 Gives Ubuntu a Run For Its Money

The Fedora Project has released Fedora 9, a significant upgrade for the popular Linux distribution. Fedora 9 packs in a number of new features including an improved package management system, KDE 4 and more.

Perhaps the best part of Fedora 9 is the new live USB options. Fedora has always made it easy to go from a live CD to a bootable USB stick, but the new options allow for a non-destructive install and persistent data. The non-destructive part means that, provided your USB stick has space, you can install Fedora 9 and none of your existing files will be lost.

Thanks to the persistent data features, booting from a live USB install isn’t just a temporary trial experience like the live CD — any changes you make or files you create are stored and available the next time you boot up, and that includes system files as well. Fedora sent me a live USB stick with RC1 last week and I was able to upgrade the USB stick to the final release this morning without issue (note that the Fedora Project servers appear to slammed at the moment, so be patient and use a torrent download if possible).

Fedora 9 introduces a nice upgrade to PackageKit which allows you to treat all your updates the same whether they’re RPG, UM or Apt. There’s also a new feature that detects when you’re missing a piece of software needed to open a file. PackageKit will pop up a window offering to install what you need (provided there’s a free software package available).

Fedora continues its long tradition of strong Java support with OpenJDK6 and IcedTea (an implementation of OpenJDK, released in Fedora 8) included by default.

As always Fedora ships with both GNOME and KDE desktops available. The GNOME version comes with the 2.22 and all its assorted goodness like GVFS and more (see our Ubuntu review for more on what’s new in GNOME 2.22). On the KDE side Fedora 9 makes a leap of faith and defaults to KDE 4 with all the latest and greatest eye candy and new features.

After playing with the release candidate for a week or so I’m happy to report that Fedora 9 has made some significant strides and gives Ubuntu a serious run for its money when it comes to user-friendliness.

First Look at Sulphur, Fedora 9

- Encryption support, ext4 filesystem, kernel 2.6.25 and more!

Believe it or not, Fedora 9 (dubbed Sulphur) is here! It was OFFICIALLY released (as expected) today May 13th, 2008. With hard drive encryption support implemented in the graphical installer (a feature that is missing from the popular Ubuntu distribution), latest Linux kernel 2.6.25, GNOME 2.22.1, GIMP 2.4.5 and Firefox 3 Beta 5, we guess the final release will really rock your world and it is our pleasure, here at Softpedia Labs, to introduce you to the latest features of Fedora 9. Powered by the latest and greatest Linux kernel, version 2.6.25, Fedora 9 Sulphur brings you ext4 support, a filesystem that's more scalable and performs much better than ext3. Although it is considered to work better than ext3, it is still under development and not enabled by default, with some features that are not fully completed. Moreover, Fedora 9 doesn't bring you a fully ext4-compatible version of e2fsprogs, although this utility can create filesystems mountable by ext4. Fedora 9 sports the latest stable release of the popular desktop environment, GNOME 2.22.1, which features the brand new Cheese webcam photo and video making utility, Google Calendar support, PolicyKit integration, better network filesystem support and much more. If you are a KDE fan, you will get KDE 4.0.3, so you can install one or both desktop environments.

Linux examined: Fedora 9

The community edition of Red Hat's distro works well and is widely supported -- but it can be a difficult install.

By James Turner

May 14, 2008 (Computerworld) For many of us, our first painful introduction to old-school Linux installs came from installing early versions of Red Hat. Like most early Linux installs, it was a highly technical, highly finicky process that was best left to the experts.

Well, times have changed. Today, many Linux users are getting blasé about the ease with which we can install Linux. We've been spoiled by distributions such as Ubuntu, which is actually easier to install than Windows. Unfortunately, Fedora 9, the community edition of Red Hat, was a bit too much of a blast from the past for me.

This new release keeps Fedora in step with the rest of the popular distributions, updating Gnome and KDE to recent releases, improving the network management capability, freshening the kernel and adding a USB booting capability.

At a Glance

Cons: Installation may intimidate nontechnical people, and may not deal well with multiboot environments.

Who should use this: Experienced Linux users who want an enterprise-grade distribution or will be deploying software to Red Hat Enterprise.

However, when comparing Linux distributions today, the differentiating factors are fairly limited -- a 2.6.x kernel is a 2.6.x kernel, Gnome is Gnome, KDE is KDE and so on. So you have to look at a few specific factors. How easy is the install? How well does it recognize and accommodate different operating systems that share the disk? What's the package manager like? Does the distribution offer you the chance to use proprietary drivers for your hardware? How well does it work with Wi-Fi?

why should we waste time with fedora when it couldn't bring something like synaptic yet. new users always are at a fix for multimedia , property drivers etc . its useless w/o net connection. always creates some problemswhen new packages installed

hm.. is very interesting.Like usually the question who is best of the best....For example in Developping Production I keep RedHat enterprise, cause we make a lot of experiments, and I(I will repead one more time I) can keep it running in any case.On client side in Production it depends on Client, but in any case I recommend sun or Aix, or something else which come with hardware.Fedora I use to be in step with new technologies. As I have no time to read day by day copyrights and license news, I get information about open software from fedora. If some soft dissapear from fedora, it mean that I shuould not use it in production for free, or inform client about some of these products.

So. the question who is the best of the best doesn't matter, the best of the best I think that is the good work which come from cobination beetween user/admin and OS